Page 39 of Sexting the Coach
“What the fuck?” Hattie whispers, grabbing a throw pillow and holding it tight. “Why am I actually really scared?”
Mabel stands, rolling her eyes and stalking over to the door. I follow her cautiously, and when she bends down slightly to look through the peephole, she turns around to face us, shaking her head. “Nothing,” she says, “there’s nobody out there.”
Right after she says it, there’s another creak, and we jump like cats, our gazes swinging to the door again. I step past Mabel and look through the peephole, but I don’t see anyone, either.
“Maybe someone’s pet got out,” I say, grabbing the handle.
“Elsie,” Hattie warns, “don’t?—”
But it’s too late—I’m already swinging the door open, and already really regretting it.
Chapter 16
Weston
My first stupid thought when I see Elsie’s name on my phone screen is that she might be sexting me again.
Then, I see it’s not a text, it’s a phone call—and hear the vibration of the thing against the floor. I must have dropped it when I slid from sitting down to reclining.
It takes my brain a solid few seconds to reboot, and when it does, I reach down, grabbing for my phone and sliding my thumb over it to answer the call.
“Elsie?” my voice is rough when it comes out, heavy from sleep.
I was just drifting to sleep on my couch, the film from today’s game still replaying on the TV. It’s a tradition for me—I like to watch the film right after the game and take notes, so everything is fresh. The decisions I made and why, what I was thinking for each line change.
I’ve been doing it since I was a player, except back then, I was watching for my passes, my thinking in the moment. Why did I shoot? Why didn’t I? What was I thinking when I earned time in the penalty box?
Usually, it’s a routine that brings me comfort. But today, each time I got to the end of the recording, I couldn’t stop myself fromwatching the part where Elsie stood up from her seat, taking the stairs quickly, turning into the bench, and throwing herself at me.
Just a little blue blur running down the stairs, then throwing her arms around me. The footage came from the Squids admin, and not from the live broadcast, so I didn’t see the version that must be playing across TVs throughout the nation—a version that shows Elsie and I on the kiss cam, our faces framed in a neon pink heart.
By the time I finally drifted off to sleep, I was half-hard and fully frustrated.
“Weston,” Elsie says now, her voice with a slight buzz to it. Her tone is breathless, and it might excite me if it weren’t for the undercurrent of fear.
I sit up immediately, my Blue Crabs blanket sliding off my body and halfway to the floor. My muscles flex, and I’m rising up off the couch, already standing, moving to the door.
Maybe I haven’t known Elsie that long, and maybe we’re not really dating, but I know enough to know that she needs me right now.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s—” she pauses, takes a shaky breath. “There arepeoplehere, outside the apartment. In the street. One of them got past the doorman. Said he was a Doordasher.”
“People?” I ask, pausing in the middle of pulling on my jacket. “What do you mean, people?”
“Paparazzi,” she clarifies, having the good sense to sound a little embarrassed at that revelation. I know that feeling all too well. Trying to tell people that you’re dealing with the paparazzi is a two-fold event—first, the embarrassment of admitting it, which makes you feel like a self-important ass, and second, the fact of the press themselves.
As a kid who grew up with nothing—and completely outside the lens of any fame—walking right into it with Leda had felt like walking into a different universe. It was like the world had changed overnight. All the rules I thought I understood, the rules I thought everyone abided by, they were suddenly out the window. Private space didn’t exist at all. And the worst part was that Leda thought I was overreacting most of the time.
“It’s their job. It’s not a big deal—we ignore them, they bother us for a while, then we move past it. Think of it like walking through a crowd of gnats at the zoo.”
But gnats weren’t hiding in your bushes with cameras or shoving their microphones in your face. They weren’t asking probing questions, or assuming that if your wife gained a little weight, she was expecting.
The questions about pregnancy were frequent and invasive. And a massive reminder to me that Leda didn’t—and never would—want kids.
It’s something I had to be okay with. And when our marriage started to crumble a decade later, I realized that by being okay with it, I’d made a permanent decisions about that area of my life.
“Weston? Are you there?”
